Untold lives blog

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944.  Have you ever considered the role that NAAFI played in D-Day?  NAAFI placed advertisements in newspapers all over Britain in the summer of 1944 describing its work during the invasion campaign and appealing for new recruits to its canteens.

Map of defences Franceville-Plage May 1944 Online Gallery 

NAAFI (Navy, Army, & Air Force Institutes) was established in 1921 to run recreational establishments for the Armed Forces, and to sell goods to servicemen and their families.  In the weeks before the Normandy landings, thousands of young women working for NAAFI volunteered to be ‘imprisoned’ in the sealed invasion camps to provide a canteen service for the troops.  The units which left Britain on D-Day took a NAAFI invasion pack with essential supplies and comforts: cigarettes, matches, razor blades, boot laces, letter cards, shaving cream, toothpaste and soap.

From an advertisement in Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer 4 August 1944 British Newspaper Archive

On 23 June 1944 a NAAFI reconnaissance party landed in France to look for suitable premises for warehouses, stores, canteens and billets. The first main supplies of canteen goods were landed on 25 June.  These were followed the next day by sports packs containing books and indoor and outdoor games, a free gift to the troops from NAAFI.  On 10 July, NAAFI started to serve outlying units using five mobile canteens.  By 15 July, in addition to the emergency packs, NAAFI had landed 670 million cigarettes, nearly 3.3 million bottles of beer, and over 9,500 tons of tobacco, chocolate, razor blades, matches, writing materials, handkerchiefs and toiletries. 

 
Rosemary Harris in her NAAFI uniform. She worked in the canteen at RAF West Raynham, Norfolk. (Family photograph)

More than 800 NAAFI men were at work in France by the end of July 1944. Hundreds of NAAFI women volunteers were ‘also standing by, eager for the adventure of service in Europe’.  Their places at home needed to be filled and so NAAFI sent out an urgent call in the press for manageresses, cooks and counter assistants to join its canteens.

Margaret Makepeace
India Office Records

Further reading:

Advertisements placed in local newspapers throughout Britain, for example Dover Express 7 July 1944 and Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer 4 August 1944 British Newspaper Archive

In the winter of 1786, two Englishmen arrived unexpectedly at the East India Company Residency in Bushire on the Persian coast.  Major John Morrison was elderly and evidently in charge of his younger companion, Captain George Biggs.  They declared their intention to stay several days before heading to Delhi by sea.  The Resident in Bushire, Edward Galley, had heard rumour of two “European gentlemen” at the camp of Ja‘far Khān Zand, one of the contenders for the Persian throne.  He wrote to his superiors in Bombay.  Their response was the order to ‘keep an eye over [their] motion’ until Galley was ‘better acquainted with the real object of their journey into Persia’.

 
Letter from the Council at Bombay Castle to Edward Galley, Resident at Bushire, 27 January 1787. [IOR/R/15/1/1, f 45v] 

Who was Major John Morrison?  And what was he doing in the Persian Gulf on business that was seemingly neither commercial nor sanctioned by the Company?

Fifteen years earlier, Major Morrison had written to John Cartier proposing an alliance with Shah Alam II, the Mughal Emperor.  The provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa would be given over to the English in exchange for arms, military training, and payment of the tribute owed to the Shah.   When Cartier did not even reply, Morrison travelled to England as the Shah’s ambassador and peppered ministers and men of influence (in particular Henry Dundas) with the same and similar proposals, presenting them either as commercially or strategically advantageous depending on the audience.

 
Shah Alam II  [Add.Or.5694] Images Online 

After campaigning for more than a decade without success, Major Morrison returned to the East, arriving at Ja‘far Khān’s camp near Shiraz in late 1786.  His mission was to settle a treaty of commerce between the Khan and his employer Shah Alam.  However when Morrison heard of Shah Alam’s imprisonment by the Marathas, he wrote to Ja‘far Khān with an extraordinary offer.  In exchange for ten lakhs of rupees, (approximately £15,000,000 today), Morrison would travel to Europe and purchase ‘great guns and small arms and other articles of war’ with which he would return to Shiraz and ‘conquer the whole Kingdom of Persia for you’.

This shift in potential ally prompted Morrison to return to England instead of heading from Bushire to Delhi. He renewed his epistolary bombardment of Dundas: keeping a Zand on the Persian throne would prevent the capital moving northwards to Tehran, as would happen under the Qajars, and closer to the influence of Russia. 

 
1797 map of Persia and parts of Central Asia, the theatre of the Great Game [IOR/X/3097] 

Dundas was preoccupied with the French threat, and Morrison failed to get sanction for his schemes.  Was Morrison genuinely and patriotically trying to promote the interests of the Company and the English nation as a whole?  Or was he attempting to play a dangerous political game to further his own ends?  A letter sent from him in February 1792 to Lord Grenville contains a telling remark.  If his plan is not accepted, Morrison threatens, he will lay it before ‘a foreign court, who, I am convinced, will immediately carry it into execution’.

John Hayhurst
BL/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Qatar Digital Library

Tonight BBC2 is showing the second and final episode of the series The Birth of Empire: the East India Company.  Dan Snow will discuss the shift from trade to empire, and the increased state control of the Company.  We will see the defeat of Tipu Sultan and the treasures that were looted after his death; the creation of the Indian civil service; the problems caused by religious differences; and how the relationship between the British and Indian peoples changed in the years leading up to the ‘Indian Mutiny’ and the subsequent death of the East India Company.  

Here are more of the interesting stories discovered by Robert Hutchinson, the historical consultant for the series.

Stunning architecture

The British were amazed at what they found in India. One intrepid traveller arrived at the Taj Mahal in 1796 and described his awestruck reaction:

– ‘I was mute with astonishment. We arrived at the tomb and then again I paused, lost in wonder and admiration to see a building as large almost as St Paul’s magnified also with four turrets, nearly the height of The Monument and all of pure white marble was a sight so truly novel, great and magnificent that imagination itself could have painted it…’ [IOPP/ [MSS Eur B284 f.4v]

P395 T. Daniell, A distant view of the Taj Mahal, Agra (London, 1801)    Images Online

Exotic wildlife

The popular guide to life in India, called the East India Vade Mecum warned in the early 19th century: ‘Snakes have been found in the beds wherein gentlemen were about to repose. A lady was called in by her servant to see a snake that lay contentedly between two of her infants while sleeping in a small cot. This perilous situation produced the utmost anxiety’.

  A Saumpareeah or snake catcher exhibiting snakes, from The costume and customs of modern India (London, c.1824)    Images Online

 Religion

In 1808, Maj. Gen Charles Stuart – ‘Hindoo Stuart’ - published a book, Vindication of the Hindoos, in which he attacked the spread of unauthorised evangelical missionaries in India, claiming that: Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilized society.

He wrote of the dangers of these ‘obnoxious’ missionaries whose efforts to convert Indians to Christianity was ‘impolitic, inexpedient, dangerous, unwise and insane’.  If a Hindu’s religion is insulted, he warned, ‘what confidence can we repose in the fidelity of our Hindu soldiers?’

 Hindoo temple near the Strand Road, from Views Of Calcutta And Its Environs Images Online

Death of the East India Company

The last Company Governor General seemed to sense impending trouble. The speech made to the farewell banquet given by the EIC Court of Directors by Lord Canning before he sailed out to India, (arriving in Calcutta in February 1856) contained these prophetic words: ‘I wish for a peaceful term of office but… we must not forget that in the story of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise at first no bigger than a man’s hand but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us…’

East India Company coat of arms c.1730 originally hung above the chairman's seat in the Directors' Court Room at East India House, Leadenhall Street  Images Online 

Read our previous blogs about the programme and its exploration of the East India Company archives:

The Birth of Empire: the East India Company

Dipping into the archives with Dan Snow

See more about Birth of Empire here

A common sight across the length and breadth of Britain are memorials to those who lost their lives in the First World War. In cities, towns and villages, churches and cathedrals, public squares and gardens, and in public buildings of all kinds, these memorials commemorate the sacrifice made by men and women from all walks of life during that terrible conflict. In 1919, the India Office commissioned its own memorial tablet to commemorate the members of the India Office and the India Store Depot who died for their King and country in the Great War.

Quotes for the cost of the work were sought from three companies, J W Singer & Sons Ltd, Farmer & Brindley Ltd, and Ashby & Horner Ltd, and designs were received from each. A file in the India Office Records contains the correspondence and other papers relating to the memorial, along with examples of the different designs. Proposed designs included a bronze centre panel with Sicilian marble frame (by Singer & Sons) for £250, and a white marble panel with an oak frame (by Ashby & Horner Ltd) for £425.

 
IOR/L/SUR/6/20/49 

The contract was subsequently awarded to Farmer & Brindley Ltd for a design in alabaster and statuary marble at a cost of £316. The contract, dated 24 December 1919, and signed by T Herbert Winney, India Office Surveyor, stipulated that the work was to be completed within 20 weeks of that date. However, a number of points remained to be settled. It was decided on chocolate brown for the colour of the lettering in the inscription, and the date of 1914-19 was chosen (although the Military Department insisted that the Great War had not yet officially ended). These issues, along with amendments to the inscription, caused delays, and by October 1920 the India Office was urging Farmer & Brindley to finish the work in time for Armistice Day. The memorial was officially unveiled by the Marquis of Crewe on the 26 February 1921. It lists the names of 30 members of the India Office who died during the war, and is in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office building in Westminster.

IOR/L/SUR/6/20/49  

In the same file are copies of the India Office Roll of Honour, recording all those who served in the Great War in whatever capacity. Listed in alphabetical order, class distinctions were dissolved. Included equally in the list are messengers, such as C D A Simmons, Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy, and J Teague, Motor Machine Gun Corps, and a Member of the Council of India, Sir T Morison, K.C.I.E., 2nd Lieutenant in the Cambridgeshire Regiment. Also listed is Miss G F C Arnell, who served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment.

Lynn Osborne and John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:

War memorial for members of India Office who died 1914-19 [IOR/L/SUR/6/20/49]

War Memorials Archive

Cityread London, which launched this week, will run throughout April with events in every London borough; aimed to promote reading for pleasure and also to encourage Londoners to contemplate their city’s history.  Each year Cityread London selects a book for the whole capital to read together and for 2014 this is My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young, selected to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One.  Louisa will be speaking about this at a Cityread London event at the British Library on 14 April.

Also as part of the Cityread London event programme, several public libraries are hosting a production by the District 6 Theatre Group, on the role and experience of soldiers of colour in World War One; exploring the contribution made by people of all colours, ethnicities, religious beliefs and nationalities to the British war effort in World War One, whether by serving in the armed forces or providing material and financial resources.  You can see this performance on these dates at the following libraries:

15 April - Richmond Lending Library

22 April - Barking Learning Centre 

24 April – Dagenham Library

28 April – Battersea Library

30 April - Wembley Library

Photo 24/(122) An Indian Cavalry horse hospital in a French factory, 1915. 
 

It is encouraging to hear that Cityread London 2014 events are including these narratives; as non-white non-European experiences of World War One have traditionally been given less media coverage than other aspects of the war.  For researchers interested in this topic, there is a wealth of material in the British Library’s India Office Records with information about the stories of South Asian soldiers serving in the British Indian Army  during World War One; we blogged about some of these stories previously in posts Indian soldiers’ views of England during World War I, An Indian soldier in France during World War I, and The Indian Sepoy in the trenches.  Furthermore last month we wrote about the experiences of Indian Muslims travelling from India to Mecca as part of the Hajj during World War One  in the post Pilgrim traffic during the First World War.

Stella Wisdom
Digital Curator

Further reading 

World War One sources on the British Library website

Every year Indian Muslims undertake the journey from India to Mecca as part of the Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam.  Prior to 1947, the British Indian Government maintained a strong interest in the welfare and safety of pilgrims travelling from India, and regularly received reports from the British Agent at Jeddah on the yearly pilgrimage, copies of which can be found in the India Office Records.

 
The Kabba at Mecca c.1880s (X463 - plate 1) 

The outbreak of hostilities between the British and Ottoman Empires in 1914 raised fears about the impact this would have on the Hajj.  In November 1914, the British Government published an undertaking in the Gazette Extraordinary that the holy places of Arabia and Jeddah would be immune from attack or molestation by the British naval and military forces so long as there was no interference with pilgrims from India.  Similar assurances were given by the Governments of France and Russia.  Despite this, there remained fears for the safety of the pilgrims who would be entering a zone of conflict.  There was also a concern among British officials that foodstuffs and other supplies exported from India for the use of pilgrims in Jeddah would be appropriated by Turkish forces.  The Indian Government had briefly stopped exports of food from India to Jeddah following the seizure of a cargo of food supplies by the Turkish authorities in March 1915.  However reports of distress amongst pilgrims and residents of the holy places had caused the exports to be resumed. 

In the summer of 1915, the Viceroy and the Secretary of State for India exchanged telegrams on the subject of whether to prohibit pilgrimage from India.  The Secretary of State favoured prohibition of pilgrimage for that year, explaining “It is not desirable that large numbers of such [British subjects] should visit enemy country during war.  We can neither protect them nor ensure food supplies. Turks might detain influential men as hostages and would tamper with loyalty of all more effectively than last year”.  However, the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, felt there should no prohibition as it would offend Muslim opinion in India, give an impression of British weakness, and be inconsistent with the British Government’s published undertaking.  It was finally decided to allow pilgrimage from India, but to discourage Indian Muslims from embarking on it.  Assurances were also sought from the Ottoman Government, via the American Government, that food supplies exported from India for the pilgrims would not be diverted to other purposes.

Despite the considerable difficulties, pilgrims continued to travel from India on pilgrimage to Mecca every year throughout the War, although in smaller numbers.  By 1917, the situation had improved enough for Lieutenant Colonel Wilson at the British Agency at Jeddah to write “It may I think be said that, for a War Time Pilgrimage, that of 1917 may be reckoned a great success from every point of view”.

John O’Brien
Post 1858 India Office Records

Further Reading:

Revenue & Statistics Department File 3355/1914, Pilgrim Traffic and the War [IOR/L/E/7/792]

Europeana 1914-1918, a free online resource which brings together original wartime documents, films and stories from 20 countries across Europe.

Tall, handsome and charming, Richard Meinertzhagen (1878-1967) was a well-known face of the British establishment.  As a war hero and ornithologist, he was befriended and trusted by many prominent figures such as Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence.  His role in historical events was even featured in films, including A Dangerous man: Lawrence after Arabia and The young Indiana Jones Chronicles.  

BL: Photo1083/10(0)  Portrait of Meinertzhagen by Bailey, in Indian photographs of F.M. Bailey 1900-03 

But after his death this glowing image of Meinertzhagen as a British ‘hero’ was shattered when a number of frauds were discovered.  Amongst the bird collections that he donated to the Zoological Museum in Tring were many specimens stolen from the Natural History Museum. Prompted by this ornithological forgery, historians began to question the authenticity of his political persona. Brian Garfield’s book exposed Meinertzhagen as a ‘Colossal Fraud’, a liar, a charlatan, and possibly a murderer. 

 
BL: Photo 1083/10(0)  Portrait of Meinertzhagen by Bailey, in Indian photographs of F.M. Bailey 1900-03

How many of Meinertzhagen’s picaresque adventures were real and how many were pure inventions?  His private letters to his ex-colleague Colonel F M Bailey (1882-1967) in the India Office Private Papers offer us a glimpse of another side of his personality.

 Meinertzahagen was supposedly a non-Jewish Zionist and a staunch advocate of the Jewish state of Israel.  He showed unusual sympathy for the plight of the Jews since the Palestinian Mandate in 1919 to the outbreak of the Second World War.  According to his Middle East Diary, Meinertzhagen claims he conducted three interviews with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.  In a letter to Colonel Bailey dated 30 July 1933, he writes ‘I am now just off to see Hitler and Goering first as an ambassador from the British Jews to try and get Hitler to hold his hand’.  However, Garfield declares that these alleged interviews cannot be corroborated by any of the official records either in Britain or in Germany.

Was Meinertzhagen a true cynic who did not have any serious conviction one way or the other?  A letter to Bailey written on 24 September 1937 contains the remark: ‘…Fascism, Hitlerism, Bolshevism, Zionism and all the other –isms flourish.  Some day they will become –wasms and then the world will sleep again’. At other times Meinertzhagen expressed extreme right-wing political views.  In one of his letters of 1931, he claims he was ‘no believer in democracy, with the uneducated scum on top!’ 

In a letter dated 19 July 1953, Meinertzhagen gave the reasons why he refused a knighthood: ‘If I had accepted, I should have found it difficult to explain without divulging the work on which I had been engaged’.  So what particular “work” was he afraid to divulge? Could this be interpreted as a semi-confession that some of his ‘work’ in the past did not merit an honour from Her Majesty?

There is one particularly interesting piece of advice which Meinertzhagen gave to his friend in a letter of 27 January 1940 – Bailey should commission a ghost writer to spice up his memoirs to whet the appetite of the general public. Was his own Middle East Diary spiced up by a ghost writer?

Xiao Wei Bond
Curator, India Office Private Papers

Further reading:

IOPP/Mss Eur F157/246  Bailey Collection: Letters from Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen to Col F.M.Bailey, 1928-1960

Richard Meinertzhagen,  Middle East Diary, 1917-1956 (1959)

Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery (2007)

T.E. Lawrence,  Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)

It wasn’t always easy being Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, especially when there was a war on.  This was particularly true of Lieutenant-Colonel C G Prior, Britain’s senior administrator, based at Bushire in Persia, who was knighted in 1943 as Sir Geoffrey Prior and wrote a review of the year of his knighthood in his Administration Report of the Persian Gulf for the Year 1943.

 IOR/R/15/1/719 f. 262 

Despite the fact that the Gulf was an exceptionally quiet posting in those war-torn years (the 1941 Report says that the Gulf enjoyed ‘almost perfect peace’ throughout that year), Prior found plenty to complain about.  His review covers everything from his annoyance that the Government of India had stopped the export of cereals, which forced the local populace to give up their habitual diet of rice overnight, vastly increasing the workload of Gulf officers, to the failings of the British military authorities, who were given control over wide areas about which they knew ‘nothing whatever’ and failed to share important intelligence information with civilian colleagues, such as the report of the capture of a German agent called Mayer.

However, Prior reserved his greatest indignation for Britain’s American allies.  ‘It would’, he begins quietly, ‘be agreeable to record that our Allies were cooperative and considerate, but this was not the case.  Almost without exception the American detachment and visiting American officers whether of the Army or the civil organisations showed little desire to consult with their British colleagues or to cooperate with them’.  An instance of this, says Prior, was the decision of the Americans to electrify the perimeter of their camp at Bushire, without giving any intimation of their intentions to the British Army or civilian authorities.  This, says Prior unfeelingly, ‘recoiled upon their own heads as the first victim was an American soldier'.  He goes on, ‘Their behaviour varied from the unsatisfactory to the deplorable’.  Not even the cutlery was safe: ‘At the fête given in aid of the Persian Gulf Fighter Fund at Sabzabad, a number of articles including spoons and forks were stolen from the house, apparently by officers who penetrated the building’.  The crime was perhaps stimulated by the effects of liquor on an unprecedented scale, as ‘The drunkenness shown by the men on this occasion was without parallel in Bushire’.

There were other, even more shocking displays of bad behaviour for British officials elsewhere in Persia, and ‘the incident of the four American soldiers who penetrated the Governor’s house at Khorramshar one night and requested him to supply them with women will long be remembered’.

Prior at least provides some balance by also expressing his disapproval of ‘our Russian allies’. These, ‘though far better behaved’ than the Americans, ‘showed no desire to cooperate’ and perhaps worst of all for the clubbable British, remained ‘inscrutable and aloof’.  Prior concludes unkindly by saying that ‘The Residency as a whole heaved a sigh of relief when both these bodies took their departure’.

Martin Woodward
Archival Specialist, Gulf History Project 

Qatar Digital Library

Further reading: 

British Library, ‘Administration Reports of the Persian Gulf’. IOR/R/15/1/719, ff. 262ff